I like to close Safari with no pages loaded because if I wanted to keep the page, I’d either bookmark it or save it on Instapaper if I just wanted to read it later. I like it neat and clean with a nice, fresh page each time I open it. Apple, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that if I don’t have a page I’d left open in Safari, then of course I must want to wait for the fucking Bookmarks menu every time I open it. I DON’T! Just give me the fucking blank page I left when I closed the goddamned thing and STAY OUT OF MY WAY! Jesus, that annoys me, but I haven’t found another browser I like better (except for one that had ads and no “pro” version without them, so fuck that), and in any case, links are going to open in Safari. Maybe there’s a plist somewhere that I can change the behaviour? No time to look now, but every time I just want to type or paste in an address, or quickly search Google for something, I could throw the fucking phone across the room when I get no response because the useless fucking Bookmarks are still loading. I think I have four Bookmarks beyond the defaults, and the only reason I have those is because I visit the pages so seldom that I don’t remember the URL. Fuck off, Safari–stop “helping” me!! ARGH!

I (heart) terminals! When something bad happens in a GUI, terminal often offers an easy way out. Something went awry with one of the repos on Cydia this morning. Bad data got passed, and Cydia was sent into a crash loop. After the first crash, and subsequent “sad iPhone” (that never puts me in my happy place), rebooting the phone didn’t help, so I figured it wasn’t just me and went a-googling. In looking for a solution, I saw ominous things like, “restore your firmware” and “re-jailbreak your phone,” and I thought, “Oh, HELL, no!” Waaaay too lazy for that–Christ, I just got around to updating to 3.12 and re-jailbreaking last week–I kept looking for a better way. I came across references to SSHing in and deleting sources lists, which would have been do-able, but then I found magic. Terminal magic. Wonderful, beautiful terminal magic. The solution was not to restore the phone and re-jailbreak. I didn’t even have to SSH in…all I had to do was fire up my trusty terminal, login as root and type a single, very familiar command: apt-get update. Cydia, after all, is just a fancy frontend for apt, and running an update from terminal to get the non-corrupt data gave me the good stuff, and Cydia no longer stuck in a crash loop. Smoochies to terminals everywhere–love you little text-based command line guys! <3

Even if I were in the area, and had what you want, the fact that YOU VIRTUALLY SCREAMED AT ME, combined with the fact that at absolutely no point in time is taking a photo of a dog–even a dog described as “in trouble”–going to be an emergency, means you lost me. What’s the matter with the animal…is its FB profile photo out of date? Oh, I know–it’s looking for a hookup on Craigslist and needs the photo for that! No? So what’s the emergency…is there now some “virtual vet” service that I don’t know about? Photo of a dog…never an emergency. Shouting at me…absolutely guarantees that I’ll ignore your request even if I might have been able to help.

Look, dumbass, I don’t care how excited you are or where you’re going, or what you’re getting, you’re not five fucking years old, and it’s not, “(X) more sleeps until (Y).” Those 24h periods are called DAYS, not “sleeps”, you utterly insufferable idiot, and you are supposed to be an adult who speaks English as a native. “Sleeps.” Jesus Christ on a tapdancing goddamned cracker. I want to kick you in the crotch every time I read that (or hear it). IT IS NOT FUCKING CUTE! HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW THAT?!?

Rediculous. Retarted. I can almost (almost) understand mistakes made with homophones, or even “tricky” words that have strange spellings carried over from dead languages, but come ON! If you didn’t speak like you have Down Syndrome (or a mouthful of Oreo Double Stuf) you’d be able to figure out that it’s “REE-diculous”, not “red” like the colour, and “retarDed”. You know, like the verb “retard” means “to impede the progress of”. Retarted. I think that one pisses me off the most because at least “rediculous” makes me think of old Sylvester and Tweety cartoons. Still stupid, but at least vaguely amusing. “Retarted” just sounds silly; what does it even mean? The “retarted” person in question had to make a caramel flan over again? Had to re-apply his or her slutty makeup? “Retarted”…tarted again. Seriously? Fuuuuck.

Also, no, I will not “upgrade” my functional free version of WP for iPhone to an ad-supported version. Suck my dick (okay, if I had one). Make a version for which I can pay and not have fucking AdMob (always makes me think of “the mob”, except they’re marketing douchebags) crap flipping and sliding all over the goddamned place whilst I’m trying to actually do something. The phone’s screen is small enough, and it has a software keyboard; I’m not giving up valuable screen real estate for fucking advertising. Fuck you, and your little dog, too!

Jesus H. clog-dancing Christ, what is wrong with you people?!? All I want are instructions. Why, why, why must I sit through four and a half minutes of shaky, out-of-focus video with your dumb ass umm-ing and uhhhh-ing in the background as you poke icons on the phone screen when you could have typed up the fucking tutorial–including screencaps, if you’d liked–in less time than it took to make the stupid video, let alone upload it to YouTube? I know I’m old, but FFS, text is still a valid and very useful method of communicating information! ARGH!!!

In your prayers, thank god for this, pray for this person, or that thing, or some whatever. Someone in an accident and didn’t actually die? Well, good goshins, let’s thank omnipotent and omniscient Invisible Sky Daddy for that…though don’t you think that if your deity had any compassion (or even existed), there wouldn’t have been a fucking potentially dangerous accident in the first place? Keep the Christ in Christmas, even though Christianity stole the good bits of it from the pagans to make their religion more interesting to potential converts. How many fucking Christmas trees are in the Bible, you asshats? ZERO, that’s how many. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP. Each and every one of you poor, simple-minded, deluded bastards…shut the fuck up. I’m almost getting to hate FB now; between the boring to-do lists, tedious pictures of homely kids and the thanking god and praying all over the fucking place, I have a hard time finding a reason to log in. Maybe I just need to pare the boring and religious people off my list. That’d leave me with maybe half a dozen friends, but they’d be the interesting and fun ones! 😀

sudo hddtemp /dev/sd?  So I won’t forget (again).

Still don’t know WTF is wrong with the Sensors ACPI temperature display; it’s apparently not using lm-sensors or even sensors, which (AFAIK) is specified by the script, so I have no idea where it’s getting the information, but it doesn’t make any sense for it to show 76C on a cold boot, but if I reboot straight away, 29C. Something’s wrong, but no time to mess with Python I don’t really understand. No time because IT’S A THREE-DAY WEEK, BABY!!

I’d be able to retain this information for more than the time it takes to actually process the video, and wouldn’t have to look it up every goddamned time.

ffmpeg -i <filename.mpg> -deinterlace -ar 44100 -r 25 -qmin 3 -qmax 6 <filename.flv>

So I basically rule today. First, I fixed my Hello Kitty phone theme so that I didn’t have to separately select the main theme as well as the SMS theme; they’re now all in one, and I changed the images for lockscreen and SMS (might redo the SMS to move HK up just a bit, but might be too lazy).

I also did my “Black and Blue” theme with the space background, but didn’t find images I liked more than the wallpaper for the lockscreen or SMS, so I left them the same. The My Little Pony theme was already complete, but I haven’t yet decided whether I want to change my “Pink and Penguins” theme or leave it the same.

I also rule because when I logged into FB on my computer this morning to get rid of some stupid app messages (WHEN will the iPhone app allow you to change the setting to hide spammy fucking app messages instead of having to go to a computer and do it!?!) and noticed that one of my friends from Flickr had liked and made a comment on her friend’s photo of a butterfly. I couldn’t recall offhand what it was, but knew it was Nymphalidae because of its face and legs, I knew I’d seen it somewhere before, and since I also knew STL Zoo’s butterflies are nearly all Asian species, and nearly all popular zoo species, I did a GIS and found it. Actually, I didn’t find it, but I found a related species. I still rule, though, because I made the ID from a small dorsal drawing on a stamp when the photo was of the ventral side of the wings only.

Unidentified butterfly:

Image of a stamp that a GIS for “Nymphalidae Asia” turned up. Once I had the genus as Cethosia, I did another search, and got a list of species in that genus, then GIS for each (there were only four or five, so it didn’t take long). I found photos both with and without a bold, well-defined bar on the forewing labelled as C. biblis, so I couldn’t absolutely swear that’s it, but the genus is right, and she can at least say “it’s a Lacewing”. I couldn’t let such a pretty little bug go entirely unidentified! 🙂